Keywords

1 Introduction

Technological learning and innovation are essential for economic growth and development, and are major determinants of long-term improvements in income and living standards. While in the more advanced economies technological progress involves the generation of new knowledge that can be applied to productive activity, for developing countries technological progress is strongly influenced by their ability to access, adapt and diffuse technological knowledge that has been generated abroad (UNCTAD 2014). Strengthening the technological capabilities of developing countries will be critical for the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UNCTAD 2019). The status and trends of innovation can be assessed through patent analysis, as was done for India by Abraham and Moitra (2001), or e.g. technological development of a selected technology such as UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) can be reviewed through patent analysis of its hardware and software as done by Chen et al. (2016).

But technological progress is not only important for economic growth and development, but also plays a role in increasing society resilience against natural disasters. Callaghan (2016) claims that disasters decreasing the number of factors of production would stimulate innovations that will reduce the use of them—technological innovation is therefore of great importance in mitigating climate disasters, including natural disasters.

Science, Technology and Innovation thus play a crucial role in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (UNISDR 2015). This is more clearly visible in the Science and Technology Roadmap to Support the Implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (UNISDR 2019). Cui et al. (2021) studied scientific challenges of research on natural hazards and disaster risk, with the emphasis on China. As one of the short-termed goals (2021–2025) for China, technology platform construction was named, including policy communication in science and technology innovation. Closely related to innovation are intellectual property rights, among them also patents. Hu et al. (2018) studied the innovative response to climate disasters in modern and historical China. In modern China (investigated period 2005–2013), past climate disasters have led to an increase in the number of disaster-mitigating patents that boost also innovations in other fields. In historical China (investigated period 11 to 1910) climate disaster only spurred innovations in disaster mitigation fields and not in others. They concluded that it is important for policymakers, including governments, to increase investment into research and technological development sectors after climate disaster.

As a widely known example, we may name the Reinforced Earth®, originally invented in 1963 as a method of using composite earth as a supporting structure—until nowadays claiming numerous patent families, trademark and design rights as forms of intellectual property (RECo 2022).

An inventor receives a patent, if (i) the invention is new, (ii) an “inventive” step is recognizable, and (iii) the idea has to be industrially applicable or useful (Ullberg 2020). The patent system grants and enforces temporal exclusive, transferrable, and licensable private rights on inventions—that provide solutions to (mostly) technical problems in the area of products and processes (Ullberg 2020). Patents are an important result of progress in science and technology and related innovation activities—but not all patents are science-based, they can also be non-science-based (Wang and Li 2018). University-owned patents are more related to scientific questions while corporate-owned patents are more connected with direct commercial goals (Sterzi 2013).

Bae et al. (2014) analyzed existing patents related to real-time monitoring and detection technology for landslides on natural terrain. The purpose of patent analysis was to understand landslide hazard technology trends and to develop new advanced technology. The study searched patent data using key words related to landslide monitoring and detection in Korea, the USA, Japan, China (Hong Kong), Europe, and Taiwan. The patents were divided into five main categories and five to seven subcategories in each main category and analyzed by year, country, and applicants. The results were utilized to derive a portfolio of promising technologies for each country.

Jelić (2018) presented systematic overview of patented inventions created in twenty-first century by Serbian scientists and inventors in the field of seismic safety of structures and landslide remediation, as well as examples of their specific application.

The International Consortium on Landslides (ICL) initially launched a book series entitled “ICL Contribution to Landslide Disaster Risk Reduction” (CLDRR; Springer 2022b) to publish integrated research on all aspects of landslides. As decided by the Kyoto 2020 Commitment for Global Promotion of Understanding and Reducing Landslide Disaster Risk (KLC 2020), this book series was in 2022 replaced by an open-access book series entitled “Progress in Landslide Research and Technology” (P-LRT), published by Springer Nature (Sassa 2021b). The book series is one of the ICL main contributions to the KLC 2020 Landslide Commitment. Many signatories of the KLC 2020 Landslide Commitment are active in technology development and technology transfer (Konagai 2021a; 2021b; 2021c; 2021d). This article is well aligned with the title and aims of the new ICL book series, as well as it is a contribution to the KLC 2020 Landslide Commitment activities (Sassa 2021a).

In this study, the focus was given to the field of progress in landslide research and technology as can be evaluated by the wealth of landslide-related patents in freely accessible databases of patent documents, using the basics of patent searching (Clarke 2018).

The following research questions were defined when working for this study:

  • what is the number of landslide-related patent documents in diverse databases;

  • what is the share of landslide-related patent documents coming from academic institutions, research institutions, ministries or other public bodies, and industry;

  • in which technical fields landslide-related inventions are claimed;

  • which countries are leaders in patenting landslide technologies;

  • how often scientific journals cite landslide-related patent documents?

2 Materials and Methods

2.1 Meaning of the Term “Patent”

When searching in databases or on the web for information related to patents, we should bare in mind that the English word “patent” has several meanings (Lexico 2022):

  • patent as noun with synonyms such as copyright, licence, legal protection, right, … or adjective with synonyms such as patented, licensed, protected, … (this meaning is of relevance for this study);

  • patent as adjective with synonyms such as obvious, clear, evident, apparent, … (and this is not relevant for this study).

and results of a search must be checked for this difference (for more definitions on the term “patent” you may see (Collins 2022)). Furthermore, some publishers (e.g. Springer Nature) demand that all the authors of a manuscript reveal their potential competing interests among them also whether they held any patents related to the content of published articles. This fact complicates any search for patents in their database (i.e. SpringerLink).

2.2 Patent Documents Databases

There are different search engines available to search for patent documents, among others:

  • Espacenet is a free-of-charge patent search engine offered by the European Patent Office (EPO 2022a) that includes 130 + million patent documents from around the world (EPO 2022b).

  • Google Patents is a patent search engine created by Google that includes 120 + million patent publications from 100 + patent offices around the world (Google 2022).

  • Derwent Innovations Index is a research tool within Web of Science (Clarivate 2022a) with patent information on more than 30 million inventions detailed in over 65 million patent documents from over 50 patent issuing authorities, including information on patent citations.

  • Innography PatentScout™ is a private web-based platform (Clarivate 2022c).

The Espacenet database of inventions and technical developments covers the period from 1782 to today. The following definitions are helpful to understand the elements of patent documents (EPO 2022b):

  • Applicant: A person (i. e. natural person) or an organization (i. e. legal entity) that has filed a patent application. There may be more than one applicant per application.

  • Claims: Part of a patent application or specification. Defines the technical features for which protection is sought. There are dependent and independent claims. Independent claims contain the main features of the invention. Any independent claim can be followed by one or more dependent claims.

  • Classification: Patent classification is a system of sorting inventions and their documents into technical fields covering all areas of technology. Espacenet shows the International Patent Classification (IPC, established in 1971; IPC 2022) and the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC 2022), where available. Every patent document, regardless of whether it is an application or a granted patent, is given one or more classification symbols by an examiner indicating that it is allocated to a specific area of technology.

  • Country codes: consist of two letters indicating the country or organization where the patent application was filed or granted.

  • Description: Part of a patent application or specification. Discloses the invention as claimed, specifies the technical field to which the invention relates and indicates any prior art the applicant is aware of.

  • Inventor: A person designated as an inventor in a patent application. An inventor can also be an applicant. An inventor is always a natural person. There may be more than one inventor per application.

  • Patent family: Set of interrelated patent applications filed in one or more countries to protect the same or a similar invention by a common inventor and linked by a common priority (or priorities).

In the Google Patents database one can search among patent titles, abstracts, claims, or in all three of them.

In the Derwent Innovations Index one can search among patent titles (“Title”), patent titles and abstracts (“Topic”), inventor names (“Inventor”), patent assignee names (“Assignee”) and patent numbers (“Patent Number”).

2.3 Patent Classifications

Patent offices worldwide use the International Patent Classification (IPC 2022). There are approximately 70 000 different IPC codes for different technical areas, grouped to classes A to H: A-Human necessities, B-Performing operations; transporting, C-Chemistry; metallurgy, D-Textiles; paper, E-Fixed constructions, F-Mechanical engineering; lighting; heating; weapons; blasting engines or pumps, G-Physics, H-Electricity.

The Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC 2022) is an extension of the IPC and is jointly management by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO 2022). It is divided into nine sections, A-H (as in IPC) and Y, and there are approximately 250,000 classifications entries (CPC 2022). Not being part of the IPC, the Class Y is for general tagging of new technological developments and cross-sectional technologies. There is available a statistical mapping of the IPC to CPC classification, if needed.

2.4 Patent Documents Citations

Looking at patent documents, a research question whether and to which extent these documents are cited in scientific literature, specifically in the indexed journals that are available in diverse databases. We used SpringerLink and SCOPUS to look at the total number of landslide-related patents cited. To look at the individual review and original research articles citing landslide-related patent documents, we have selected Web of Science (Clarivate 2022b) as a global citation database with almost 1.9 billion cited references from over 171 million records.

3 Results and Discussion

3.1 The Number of Landslide-related Patent Documents

We used a set of over 30 search terms in the three databases (Espacenet, Google Patents, and Derwenta Innovations Index) and the results are shown in Tables 1, 2 and 3. We tried to cover the variety of landslide forms (Hungr et al. 2014), without going into too much detailed description of different forms—mainly the terms “earth”, “debris”, “falling rock/stone”, “landslide”, “mudflow”, “rock avalanche”, and “rockfall” were used. We intentionally did not want to add some typical technological solutions (structural measures), such as “retaining wall” or “drainage”, since they have very high number of patent documents (e.g. “retaining wall(s)” with over 100,000 patent documents having this term in their description).

Table 1 Results of landslide-related patent documents found in the Espacenet database (EPO 2022b)
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Table 2 Results of landslide-related patent documents found in the Google Patents database (Google 2022)
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Table 3 Results of landslide-related patent documents found in the Derwent Innovation Index database (Clarivate 2022a)
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Typically, the largest number of landslide-related patent documents were found when searching in all text fields or description (Espacenet), and less when looking only in the Title or Abstract. For the Google Patents database, the best option was to look at the “Title, Abstract, and Claims”—only Abstracts or Claims can yield too high numbers (i.e. 135,828). For the Derwenta Innovation Index, only Title and Topic was searchable, yielding comparable number of patent documents. Comparing all three databases, the most patent documents are related to “Retaining walls” followed by “Landslide(s)”, “Debris flow(s)”, “Mudflow(s)”, “Rock fall(s)”, and “Falling rock(s)”. It is clear that more general terms describing processes rather than technology are prevailing—overlooking the search term “Retaining walls” as a geotechnical technique not applicable only in landslide disaster risk reduction. In total, a rough estimation is that in the Google Patents database there is 15,000 + landslide-related patent documents, and in the Espacenet and the Derwent Innovation index database 5000+, respectively.

3.2 Patent Documents, Inventors and Applicants

For the analysis of science and non-science-based landslide-related patents we used only the Espacenet database and the selected 18 search terms in “Claims” (Table 4). The Inventors respectively Applicants were grouped into Academic institutions and Research institutions for science-based patents, and to Ministries and Industry for non-science-based patents (for search terms see the legend at the end of Table 4). General conclusion can be that the number of technological (non-science) based patents is higher than that of academic (science-based) patents, with some specific field of applications, where the situation is the opposite (e.g. “Debris flow(s)”, “Landslide displacement”, “Landslide monitoring”).

Table 4 Landslide-related patent documents with at least 100 claims found in the Espacenet database (EPO 2022b), with respect to inventors and applicants’ category
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3.3 Patent Documents and Technical Field

We have classified the landslide-related patent documents from two databases: (i) the Espacenet using 4 search terms (Debris flow(s), Falling rock(s), Landslide(s), Mud flow(s)) in Title, and (ii) Derwent innovation Index using the same 4 search terms in Topic. We applied the International Patent Classification (IPC 2022), and the results are given in Tables 5 and 6. The total number of patent documents in Tables 5 and 6 can vary as patents documents can be attributed to more than just one category. The Derwent Innovation Index database yields more landslide-related patent documents than the Espacenet database.

Table 5 International Patent Classification (IPC 2022) used for classification of patents and utility models according to the different areas of technology to which they pertain. Selected landslide-related patent documents from the Espacenet database (EPO 2022b), with respect to the field of IPC
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Table 6 International Patent Classification (IPC 2022) used for classification of patents and utility models according to the different areas of technology to which they pertain. Selected landslide-related patent documents from the Derwent Innovation Index database (Clarivate 2022a), with respect to the field of IPC
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In both databases, the prevailing patent documents are found by searching the term “Landslide(s)”, followed by the term “Debris flow(s)”, “Falling rock(s)” and “Mud flow(s)”. With regard to the different areas of technology to which landslide-related patent documents pertain, the categories “G-Physics” and “E-Fixed constructions” are clearly prevailing: “G” for debris flows and landslides, and “E” for fallings rocks and mudflows. Other IPC categories are much less present—in the order of a few percentages.

Within the category “E-Fixed constructions”, the most abundant is category “E02-Hydraulic engineering; Foundations; Soil-shifting” (roughly one third of all landslide-related patent documents). Within the category “G-Physics”, the most abundant is category “G1- Measuring; Testing” followed by “G08-Signalling”.

3.4 Patent Families, Country of Publication

For the analysis of landslide-related patent documents with regard to the country of publication we used patent family distribution in the Espacenet, the Google Patents, and the Derwent Innovation Index databases for 4 search terms in titles of patent documents (“Debris flow(s)”, “Falling rock(s)”, “Landslide(s)”, “Mud flow(s)”). In all three databases, the most abundant category of patents was related to “Landslide(s)”, followed by “Debris flow(s)”. For country codes we used the two-letter abbreviations from the Espacenet. The search string for the Espacenet database was limited to the Title. The search string for the Google Patents database was limited to Title, Abstract, and Claim: e.g. (TI = (debris flow)) (AB = (debris flow)) (CL = (debris flow)) country:EP. The search in the Derwent Innovation Index was performed for Topics, covering patent titles and abstracts, and country of publication was searched in the Patent Number. The results are given in Tables 7, 8 and 9.

Table 7 The number of patent families of landslide-related patent documents from the Espacenet database (EPO 2022b), with respect to the country of patent publications
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Table 8 Selected landslide-related patent documents from the Google Patent database (Google 2022), with respect to the country of patent publication
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Table 9 Selected landslide-related patent documents from the Derwent Innovation Index database (Clarivate 2022a), with respect to the country of patent publications searched in the Patent Number
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The majority of all landslide-related patents are filled and/or granted in China (abbr. CN). This is a bit less so pronounced for patents related for falling rock(s) and mud flow(s). Due to China contribution, the five major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, are outperforming the rest of the world, also major developed countries: USA, European Union, Japan and Republic of Korea. The majority of landslide-related patents are issued by national patent offices in single countries, and thus the contribution of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) jointly is only a few percentages, in all three databases. This is in line with the general picture of the world patent applications.

Cheng and Drahos (2018) studied China Patent Office and concluded that in 2011 the Chinese patent office overtake U.S. in terms of patent applications and became the biggest patent office in the world. From 2010 to 2020, the proportion of international patents granted to inventors from high-income countries fell from 78 to 48% (NSB & NSF 2022). The U.S. share of international patents declined from 15 to 10%. The same share declined from 35 to 15% for Japan and 12% to 8% for the EU-27. In contrast, China’s share of international patents increased from 16% in 2010 to 49% in 2020.

WIPO (2021) reports that in 2020 in total 45.7% of all patent applications worldwide was filled in China (1,497,159 out of 3,276,700 applications). With regards to patent applications, China was followed by USA, Japan, Republic of Korea, Germany, France, UK, Switzerland, India, and the Netherlands—considering resident and non-resident patent applicants. In the field of landslide-related patents, India and the Netherlands are much less active, and also USA are behind Japan and Republic of Korea, but in front of EU member countries.

Following the undisputed China as number one, the next strongest countries in patent applications are: USA and Republic of Korea for debris flow(s), Republic of Korea and Japan for falling rock(s) and for landslide(s), and USA for mud flow(s).

3.5 Patent Documents Citations

The annual number of patent applications in the world can be taken from the World Bank data (World Bank 2022a, b), the data for 1990, 2000, 2019 and 2020 are presented in Table 10. Worldwide, there is a steady growth of patent applications, from less than 1 million in 1990 to over 3 million in 2020. Residents of countries where patent applications were filled, are generally outnumbering non-residents for many countries, but not in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, South Africa, and USA.

Table 10 Patent applications in the World Bank database (i.e. World Development Indicators), given for selected countries where patents were filled, and separately for residents and non-residents (World Bank 2022a, b)
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Looking at the World Bank data (data.worldbank.org), since 2000 the ratio between the number of scientific and technical journal articles published in the World to the number of patent applications in the World is roughly 1:1, in favor of the patent applications for a few 10%—in 2000: 1,377,500 patent applications to 1,066,335 articles; in 2018: 3,325,500 patent applications to 2,554,319 articles. Both categories are growing, but the ratio remains approximately stable. The annual productivity of scientific articles can also be estimated using Scimago data (SJR 2022) that gives the productivity in 2021 in the world close to 5 million citable documents (articles, reviews, and conference papers). This estimate is higher than the of the World Bank, since also conference papers are taken into account.

For the analysis on patent document citations in scientific articles, we have selected two databases, SpringerLink and SCOPUS. The search string for SpringerLink was done within Articles “patent AND (landslides OR “debris flow” OR “falling rock” OR mudflow)”, and the search string for SCOPUS database was: ALL (“debris flow” OR “falling rock” OR landslide OR “mud flow”) AND patent AND (LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, “AR”)) AND (LIMIT-TO (SUBJAREA, “EQART”) OR LIMIT-TO (SUBJAREA, “ENGI”)) AND (LIMIT-TO (SRCTYPE, “j”))—the search was for landslide-related and patent-related articles published in journals limited to two subject areas of “Earth and Planetary Science” and “Engineering”, respectively, for the period between 2012 and 2021. The results of this search are given in Table 11. Even though SCOPUS was limited to only two subject areas, the number of citing landslide-related patent documents was comparable to SpringerLink. The absolute number of citations is extremely low (a few tens of citations per year only), having in mind the total number of landslide-related patent documents (Tables 7, 8 and 9). Only a fraction of the order of a few one-in-thousands of landslide-related patents documents are cited annually in journal review and research articles. This situation does not change, if we add mentions of patent documents to their citations.

Table 11 Number of journal review and research articles in SpringerLink and SCOPUS citing landslide-related patent documents (Elsevier 2022; Springer Nature 2022a)
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Finally, we have selected 10 landslide-related journals from the Web of Science database that regularly publish scientific articles and technical papers on landslide science and technology. Half of them were as such already recognized by Mikoš (2017), who studied top publications in geological engineering and engineering geology. We searched for those published articles in these ten journals that are citing patent documents and are to some extent related to landslide risk reduction. Table 12 shows all those 45 landslide-related articles that cite a patent document as a reference (14 articles) or at least mention patents in the text (31 articles). This analysis is another proof that landslide-related patent documents are extremely rarely cited in scientific literature if measured by journal articles.

Table 12 Cited landslide-related patent documents in the ten selected landslide-related journals from the Web of Science database (Clarivate 2022b)
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4 Conclusions and Further Work

The analysis of landslide-related patent documents, using three patent databases (Escapenet, Google Patents, Derwent Innovation Index) was performed to assess to which extent landslide science and technology is mirrored in patent applications, and what is the share of academic versus non-academic institutions. In the second part of the analysis, technical fields of patent applications were studied and countries that are the most productive ones with regard to landslide-related patent applications were searched for. The study finished by patent citation analysis in published scientific literature. The results of this study can be summarized as follow:

  1. (i)

    In the Google Patents database there is 15,000 + landslide-related patent documents, and in the Espacenet and the Derwent Innovation Index database 5000+, respectively. In the patents’ titles, abstracts and claims, processes are more often used to describe the patent than the technology.

  2. (ii)

    The number of technological (non-science) based patents is higher than that of academic (science-based) patents, with some specific field of applications, where the situation is the opposite.

  3. (iii)

    With regard to the different areas of technology to which landslide-related patent documents pertain, the categories “G-Physics” and “E-Fixed constructions” are clearly prevailing: “G” for debris flows and landslides, and “E” for fallings rocks and mudflows.

  4. (iv)

    The majority of landslide-related patents are filled and/or granted in China, followed by Japan and South Korea, USA and EU member countries—five major emerging economies (called BRICS) are outperforming developed countries, with a very prevailing Chinese contribution.

  5. (v)

    Only a fraction of the order of a few one-in-thousands of landslide-related patents documents are cited in journal review and research articles.

Further analyses of landslide-related patent documents may be done with regard to other scientific information sources such as conference proceedings, or also to social media such as Twitter or Researchgate. Nevertheless, it is quite obvious that landslide-related patent documents are not studied by landslide scientists and researchers, hopefully this important category of intellectual property finds much more application in real word solutions when planning and executing landslide disaster risk reduction.